


Indulgent Habits

by Chromat1cs



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Victorian, F/F, Fantasizing, Femslash, M/M, Masturbation, Oral Sex, Pining, Semi-Public Sex, Tailoring
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-21
Updated: 2018-11-21
Packaged: 2019-08-26 22:38:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16690246
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chromat1cs/pseuds/Chromat1cs
Summary: Marlene McKinnon, lady’s assistant and apprentice haberdasher at Lupin & Son’s bespoke, has a penchant for ladies. It just so happens that a very fine lady indeed is in need of a very specific piece of tailoring.





	Indulgent Habits

**Author's Note:**

> All my love to the [HP Femslash MiniFest](https://hpfemslash-minifest.tumblr.com/)!! This idea reared up out of nowhere with the _**Unusual Careers**_ trope prompt, and I'm so happy to have it out in the world now ^^ More femslash is always a good thing! I hope you enjoy <3

**** Marlene McKinnon is not fond of horses. 

They’re dangerous and mercurial and smell of hay, and as quite a diminutive woman she finds that the whinnying beasts are entirely too tall. She much prefers spaniels, the shaggy sort that wander about around London’s alleys and side streets, like the large black one Marlene passes each morning on her way to work on Savile Row. She calls him Snuffles, and he most certainly is not a horse. 

“Morning,” she coos, stopping to gather the muslin of her skirt away from an imposing puddle as Snuffles sees her, ears alert, and trots over fondly. It’s early enough in the day that the only other people on the street are also heading to work or market, too busy to worry about the funny young woman with curly hair bunching her skirts up to her knees like an urchin in the muck to pet a dog sitting by the gutter. Marlene has rarely cared what others think, for it’s a difficult thing to find time to do when life orphans one by their fifth birthday and leaves one to scrape together a life with nothing but a penchant for sewing and optimism.

And dogs. Marlene likes to think Snuffles can tell when she’s in a good mood. 

“What sort of day do you think we’ll have then, sir?” Marlene asks the dog brightly, both her hands petting under his furry chin and grinning to herself when he tips his head to the side to, whining as though asking the question right back to her. “Oh, perhaps. I think more hats today, or a couple fittings since it isn’t raining any longer. What say you?”

The dog barks and bounds away suddenly at that, but Marlene notices too late that it isn’t for his want to play—the hansom passing by on the near side if the street with just a bit too much speed hits the puddle Marlene had so carefully stepped around, and she barely has time to gasp and turn away from it before being showered by a fetid splash of mud. She feels it hit her dress in a wet slap, and even though it’s the height of spring she feels it leech cold and sudden against her stockings—rainwater, sat untouched all night and festering mildly. She holds in a colorful flurry of language for the simple fact she’s in broad public, but all sorts of vile words light up inside Marlene’s furthest deepest wells of passion.

Marlene McKinnon is  _ not.  _ Fond. Of horses. 

It’s just her brand of luck she assists for a haberdasher of riding habits. 

The sullied skirt isn’t much of an issue until Marlene arrives to Savile proper, where all manner of well-brushed and -bunted man and woman come for their clothing. Barely anybody is here to peruse as the shops are still opening, but Marlene feels the eyes of every tailor and salesman looking down their noses at her through the storefronts. It’s bad enough she comes from nothing, even less helpful to her case that she’s half-Romani, and worse still that she possesses almost nothing in the sense of fashion besides two small cupboard drawers of very plain dress in a little shoebox flat too far north of Mayfair to make her digs feel worth anything. Now she tops off her socially-vulgar appearance to the shops with a lurid stain across her skirts, holding her head as high as possible as she makes her way to Lupin & Son’s to begin her day. 

Marlene has worked for Mr. Remus John Lupin for three years now. She had been hired on the spot back in Marylebone when Mr. Lupin was in a scramble at the cloth vendor of Marlene’s prior employ, a small shop owned and operated by a perpetually angry woman named Lotte. Marlene had only been there as a counter girl and seamstress, subtly hemming or repairing the bolts when Lotte still wanted to hawk a damaged product and helping to cut and measure yards of it on the sales table. Mr. Lupin had burst in with two yards of Egyptian cotton torn end from end and babbled wildly that it needed to be re-stitched cleanly somehow for a fitting within the next half-hour, under threat of a client’s engagement ball the following night. Lotte had just stepped out for a cheroot and Marlene was charmed by the man’s scramble—his hair had come untamed from a pomade slick in several wild curls from what was surely a full-tilt run down the street, cheeks stained red with effort under a three-piece suit with some of the finest tailoring Marlene had ever seen—so she took to the repair immediately. She had the cloth stitched almost imperceptibly before Lotte even finished her smoke, and Mr. Lupin had offered Marlene work at his shop upon his first look at the needlework.  _ She’s squandering you here, _ Mr. Lupin had said, eyes wide as he traced Marlene’s stitch with a careful finger.  _ Come work for me, it will pay better and you’ll actually be making clothes. _

It had been a long time since Marlene hadn’t been looked down on by a tailor for her darker complexion or her sex. Filled with pride, she had left her copy of Lotte’s shop key on the counter and left with Mr. Lupin in the direction of Sevile Row, never to look back again. 

The little brass bell over the door to Lupin & Son’s tinkles merrily as Marlene huffs her way in, skirts held fastidiously away from the shining wood floor lest they drip. “Morning,” she calls to the racks of sport coats and mannequins, dressed fashionably in the latest riding habit styles. Her voice is infected with sourness for the way the day has started despite her best efforts toward neutrality— _ Bloody fucking horses _ . 

“Ta, how—good God, have you fallen on your way in?” Mr. Lupin’s eyebrows are up when he looks over his shoulder at Marlene, speaking around a hat pin held in his teeth with his pince-nez glasses perched on that sharp nose of his. He’s working on a new fascinator, one of his specialities, doubtless for a lady of one kind or another who want to look the whole part for dressage. 

“A carriage took a turn too quickly through a puddle,” Marlene replies with a glower. “Is there anything I can borrow for the day? I haven’t a good replacement at home, I did the wash yesterday and would waste too much time turning back anyways.”

“Feel free, do you need to borrow a pair of shoes from up the road?” Mr. Lupin removes the pin from his mouth and leans over his work table to peer at Marlene’s shoes, which are blessedly—or not, depending on how dearly one covets the advent of spending a day in shoes cobbled by Albus Dumbledore—free of muck. 

“Just the skirts, I think.” Marlene turns her foot around, skirts up to her knees, inspecting the toes and soles of her shoes without regard to the ridiculous picture she must paint through the shop window. She can’t find it in her to mind very much at the moment. 

“Take anything from the ladies’ that fits. If you wear it well enough it might even help, eh? Envy is the finest salesman in this city.” Mr. Lupin smiles at her kindly, the sort of smile Marlene likes best because it holds nothing but camaraderie. Part of what she adores about her assistantship at Lupin & Son’s is how safe she feels in the little shop. None of those horror stories she’s heard from the other shop girls renting rooms near her about store owners making passes at them or demanding “extra services” to keep their jobs; Marlene is entirely sure that Mr. Lupin looks at men the way Marlene looks at ladies. 

She blames it, inwardly, on dresses. Marlene rifles quickly through skirts on display besides all other types of riding accessories—overcoats, hats, waistcoats, the occasional pair of trousers only just coming into vogue—and lets herself daydream vaguely as she always does with some of the shop pieces. Running her fingers along the finer fabric is an indulgent sprint of silks, linens for the incoming summer, embroidery roughed out and finished by Mr. Lupin or more recently Marlene herself—flowers, birds, ivies, all the normal feminine fare. She isn’t sure exactly when her fancies made themselves evident, but Marlene knows after near twenty-three years of weathering life that she believes women to be the most enchanting creatures to have ever been put upon the earth. She isn’t a particularly religious person, but when the weather beings warming up to bare some of the more coquettish fashions each season Marlene finds herself secretly thanking the Lord for His indomitable gift of Eve and all others who followed. 

Marlene picks a lighter-weight skirt and waistcoat made of charmeuse, a fabric she normal stays away from because it looks a little too flash. She’s had a bit of a shit morning so far though, and she wants to brighten her day any way she can. 

“I’m to the back to check on some bolts, can you captain here for a moment?” Mr. Lupin strings his measuring tape over the back of his neck like a very thin, oddly-striped scarf and looks up at Marlene as he slides his spectacles into his breast pocket. 

“Aye,” Marlene replies a mock salute, “I’ll just dress quick.”

Mr. Lupin heads to the storage space in the back, lined with row upon row of immaculately-ordered fabrics with the unique sense of organization his father passed down to him along with the shop deed on his twenty-fifth birthday—Marlene has heard the story at least four times, all when Mr. Lupin has had more than two fingers of cognac on the odd evening they’ve shared drink after closing up for the night.  _ Gave me the shop and then quit to Paris the next day, _ he’s told her with a faraway look in those forest-green eyes of his.  _ Mother always wanted to see France. Perhaps he thought he would find her there somehow, at least her ghost,  _ rounding off the story with a sad smile on which Marlene has never felt is her place to comment. Mr. Lupin is a good drinking partner for the simple fact that he doesn’t need Marlene to commiserate with him, only listen. There’s much Marlene could find in her own life to dwell on over sharp liquor, but she’s never quite liked the taste of looking backward through her life. It makes her feel like half-separated egg whites wallowing in a dish. 

Presently behind the ladies’ privacy stand, Marlene undoes the clasps on her soiled skirt and removes her shoes, rolling down her stockings with one hand while the other opens her blouse down to her corset. Eternally grateful to the benevolent American Mrs. Flynt and her wonders of flexible corsetry, Marlene bends down to shuffle out of the pile of cloth and push it to the side before she pulls on the lender clothing and begins to fasten it. It takes several loops and tries to fasten the charmeuse in the mirror before her, a deceptively slippery fabric now that she’s pulled it on and nearly regretting it, ready to simply hold it closed with a fist and pop out into the shop again halfway in her skivvies to find a better outfit.  _ Sod it, it’s a quarter past seven o’clock, no one is out yet. _

Marlene makes the dire mistake of hardheaded assumption, her most fatal flaw. Nobody walking down Savile Row should need a riding habit fitted so early in the day, but then the day has already made it clear that Marlene will not be pardoned from poor chance.

The jamb bell chimes merily right as Marlene steps out from behind the privacy stand, and she freezes like a fox looking down a hunter’s barrel in the meadows beyond the city. A pair of perusers have stepped into the shop, both of them alluringly handsome; man and woman, outfitted in immaculately-tailored clothes with the sort of looks that could still a party to murmurs and gossip behind fans or flattened hands. He is all long lines and dark solidity, jet hair clipped to his shoulders beneath a smartly-jaunted hat with heavy black eyelashes that sweep across the shop, and steely eyes stopping on Marlene with arched brows in surprise. She is almost as tall as her companion—lithe, blonde, a small springtime cap spitting blue lace prettily around her whorled updo, in a well-cut indigo waistcoat and trousers that make Marlene blush something fierce to see the shapes of the woman’s body like that without skirts; fiercer still when the woman’s eyes flash with something that feels approving and predatory as she notices Marlene’s undress in nothing but her corset from hips upward. 

“I—welcome to Lupin & Son’s,” Marlene wheezes. She snatches a wide linen skirt hanging from the rack beside her and lifts it sideways before her like one of those photos of the dancing girls from the Americas she’s seen in the five-penny gentlemen’s magazines secreted up to her rooms on a few sordid occasions, covering up her bare decolletage with her face still burning crimson as she attempts to salvage her pride. She clears her throat and tries again at the illusion of confidence; “How can I be of service this morning?”

The blonde woman smiles coolly with lips painted as red as high-autumn apples, and Marlene insists to herself that she isn’t staring. “Sirius, I thought I told you I wouldn’t be accompanying you to any more dolly houses,” she hums. The man beside her laughs genially with a certain richness of voice that only comes from very high breeding, and Marlene bites her back teeth together to keep her wits battened down when the woman takes her time blatantly devouring Marlene with vulpine hazel eyes. 

“The day a cab opens in Savile Row is the day I finally begin investing in this block,” the man replies, removing his hat to smooth a pale, elegant hand through his shining hair. Marlene squares her shoulders behind her makeshift cover and lifts her chin with as much moxie as she can muster to sidle back over to the side of the privacy stand while the two onlookers watch her with mixed amusement. 

“Mr. Lupin is just in the back. if you would like to look around until I’ve—replaced my decency, I would be more than happy to assist you.” Marlene’s tongue feels dry as a bad scone, but her voice thankfully doesn’t quiver too madly.

“Carry on, apologies for the invasion,” the man says with a dazzling little curve of a smile, sketching shallow bow as the lady beside him only continues to smile at Marlene as though she has a delicious secret behind her teeth. 

Marlene all but dives back behind the haven of the privacy curtain and lets out the breath she hadn’t meant to be holding. Her heart is hammering against her ribs with such intensity that she’s sure it can be heard through the quiet shop, only filled now with indiscernible but animated murmurs of conversation between the two patrons.  _ Bloody fuck.  _ Marlene’s hand are trembling with adrenaline as she steps into the skirt she’d used for cover, tying it slowly with her head craned back to see the practiced knot in the mirror.  _ Aphrodite-and-a-half gets to see me half-dressed in my fucking workplace, cheers. _

There are beautiful women all over the upper echelons of London, but Marlene has never let herself even glance at the idea of being in such close proximity with one of them. Marlene McKinnon’s fantasies are meant to remain solidly planted in the realm of Madam Minerva’s bordello the next block over from Marlene’s digs—women who are plainly pretty, vaguely sad behind the eyes, never allowed to take Marlene’s coin for the watchful eye of the city morals commission that keeps Minerva from hiring boys and renting to women. Some of those plain and melancholy girls have been occasionally compelled to sneak up to Marlene’s flat to join her for a half-hour at a time, craving the touch of their own inclinations amid all the churn of their work, and Marlene has always been happy to indulge. But there’s consistently something missing there, something hollow in the rhythm of their fingers or the sweep of their tongues that Marlene has long since stopped trying to divine. Loving women as a woman has never been and will never be simple, so she’s stopped trying to uncover all the complexities that go into it. 

But this golden-haired stranger in a pair of trousers suddenly makes Marlene want to bury herself in those complexities until she fucking  _ drowns.  _

Marlene finishes dressing and smoothes her hair back down into some variety of tamed, although her rioting brown curls inherited from her mother can never be completely beaten down into the colonial European idea of order. She gives up on trying to button her waist coat and leaves it open around the simple blouse, fluffing her skirts and trying not think about the underclothes beneath that these new patrons have now seen in full splendor. She exits the privacy stand with an air of normalcy resumed like a poorly-hemmed jacket: too large around her shoulders, slightly stiff, but doing its job against the weather.

“Welcome to Lupin & Son’s,” she repeats clearly when she approaches the patrons currently admiring a mannequin on the other side of the store outfitted with Mr. Lupin’s signature men’s riding habit. Desperate for something to discuss besides the inevitable fun-poking at her distress in half-dress, Marlene nods sagely at the faceless form. “Mr. Lupin’s double breasted vest is the finest you’ll find in the entire city, you know,” she says with matter-of-fact confidence dredged up from her furthest depths. “There isn’t a better match for riding trousers anywhere, both for practicality and style.”

“A lofty claim,” the man muses with one arched eyebrow, an expression that looks as though it lives often on his face with very little room for outside scrutiny beyond his own. “Does Mr. Lupin only toil in the back of the store, or does he deign to make appearances at his front-of-house to support such rumors?”

“On the contrary, my visits to the back of the store are rare when I’ve ample time in the morning to set my materials for the day before we’re ready to receive patrons.”

Mr. Lupin returning to his workstation behind the counter draws the attention of both guests as well as Marlene, for he’s wearing the unique tone of clipped and efficient voice reserved for when he must hold the lines of his frustration against particularly difficult customers. Marlene holds in the righteous smile of camaraderie from one retailer to another to see Mr. Lupin’s tidy little frown and sharpened stare over the ridge of his pince-nez, standing beside the half-finished hat with his hand still fixed around a pincushion as though the pieces of fabric are a familiar at his beck-and-call to leap at the two clients with a twitch of his finger. He glances between them with a blatantly expectant look and squares his shoulders. “Can I help you?”

“Apologies for the early arrival, and our, ah,  _ untimely _ entrance,” the man says with another fluid little dip of a bow. Marlene watches silently as Mr. Lupin misses the light jest while his eyes flicker subtly over the column of this stranger’s figure, doubtless dressing and redressing his marmoreal build with all sorts of fabrics and articles through his tailor’s instinct within the lives and deaths of several fluttering seconds. “I am Lord Sirius Black, my companion is Lady Dorcas Meadowes. We’ve a very important hunt for which to prepare within three days’ time, and I’ve heard you’re the finest and quickest tailor of riding habits on Savile Row. Am I mistaken in any way?”

Marlene doesn’t imagine the shimmer of intrigue behind Mr. Lupin’s eyes at that vein of challenge. He’s a competitive man beneath all his quietude, as evidenced by the way she catches him muttering sometimes while he works about the way other tailors on the street can so easily get under his skin— _ You can take your running stitch and jog yourself into the bloody Thames, Mr. Pettigrew  _ being the most recent of the benign curses—and it’s clear something about this baron has sparked one of Mr. Lupin’s edges like flint.

“Hardly,” Mr. Lupin says after he clears his throat subtly, adjusting his spectacles with a flick of his fingers. “Ms. McKinnon and I will be happy to provide our services, for what sort of hunt are we preparing?”

“Foxes,” Lady Meadowes clarifies from beside Marlene, and Marlene is suddenly well aware of how close she’s accidentally placed herself to the other woman. She smells lightly of sandalwood and currant, a disarming and heady scent to Marlene’s higher faculties, and Marlene tries desperately not to make a pathetic little sound of desire from beside her.  _ Jesus risen, she’s just a woman. Calm yourself, you sapphic disaster. _

“Do you ever work with furs, Mr. Lupin?” Lord Black asks smoothly. It sounds to Marlene as though he’s tasting the name like wine, and she dutifully says nothing as she watches Mr. Lupin’s complexion color ever so slightly with the evidence that it isn’t just Marlene hearing that twist of speech in the wrong light.

“No,” Mr. Lupin says tidily, clipped and even. “Only fabrics. Furs are not something I’ve ever been interested in handling.” He swallows and blinks a few times before he moves to the massive tome of samples and styling sketches at the end of the sales counter with an abrupt turn. “Would you like to begin by discussing the different styles of habits? Ms. McKinnon, if you could prepare some tea for our guests.”

Marlene obeys immediately with a nod, leaving Lady Meadowes’ side and and not letting herself glance back at the statuesque woman currently running an invisible riot at the back of Marlene’s imagination. She sweeps into the back of the shop where a tiny stovetop and a well-used kettle wait ready to set the tea Marlene keeps running as part of her assistantship, and she tries and fails to forget the sight of Lady Meadowes looking at her like a tabled feast. Marlene would know that look anywhere; she’s served it to plenty of women herself.

The first had been Mary, a lovely girl who was apprenticing with the baker that owned the teahouse at which Marlene was able to get a serving position when she was 17. Mary was bright and gorgeous and disarmingly funny, and at least half the reason Marlene has overwhelmingly preferred blondes in the years since. She taught Marlene, in the deserted kitchens after they would close up together most nights, how to adore both their bodies with the sort of marveling attention Marlene had only previously associated with fantastical accounts of ladies and men in romance novellas she could never quite connect with. She  _ connected _ fantastically with Mary for a number of months, often two and three times in one go whenever they found the time alone, before Mary was shipped off to France with the promise of a renowned pastry chef requesting her talents just outside of Belgium. Halfway broken-hearted then, Marlene had escaped into the arms and bed of one Lily Evans, the burlesque darling infamously married to the heir of Fleamont Potter’s distillery who continued to carry on with men and women as she pleased, usually at the same time, beneath the trappings of good Christian matrimony—with, rumor had it at the time, the full and enthusiastic endorsement of her husband. For nearing two years Lily was blessed crackling fire to help cleanse Marlene’s memories of Mary, both relations different in their experience but ultimately pleasing and educational in all the best ways. But when Lily decided to shuffle off the coils of the stage and set to producing heirs and wearing dresses that covered her shoulders, Marlene was once again left on her own. 

But it’s been alright. Marlene McKinnon is good at being alone. She can fill a silence well with her own thoughts and she’s never wanted too badly for company. Filling her bedroom has been another story made mostly of Minerva’s girls and the odd traveler here and there, met in the corners of dicing houses where Marlene goes on occasion to find women who are predisposed to that commanding attitude that makes Marlene’s knees weak—those who come in as smugglers or actresses or even dancers—and she’s been hard-pressed to find somebody lately who makes her feel that telltale burn at the core of her heart again. It isn’t love, per say, but it once made Marlene feel a lot deeper than perfunctory arousal. 

She’s feeling it now in spades, and she quite wishes it would go away while she still has a full day left to work.

The basin of her belly feels too-warm, twisting full of mellifluous and tremoring want that pulses faintly with her heartbeat. Marlene is hyper-aware of her breath and her blood, still high in her cheeks with a faint flush, and her insides pitch pleasantly as she hears the treble patter of Lady Meadowes’ voice remarking positively on something Mr. Lupin has just said.  _ I thought I told you I wouldn’t be accompanying you to any more dolly houses; _ the echo of those first words thrum inside Marlene’s skull like church bells, middle-voiced in the timbre of rich patent leather. She thinks, unbidden, of what Lady Meadowes might look like emphatically patronizing one such establishment and is desperately grateful for the shriek of the kettle that lops off the head of that daydream before it reduces Marlene to jelly. 

She pours three cups of tea in well-practiced pours and balances them perfectly in her hands at once to bring them out into the shop. Mr. Lupin takes his with a nod through an explanation of different coattail cuts, Lord Black recieves his with a broad and slightly distracted smile, and Lady Meadowes accidentally brushes her fingers across the back of Marlene’s hand in her move to take the teacup. Had she not delivered Lady Meadowes’ tea last, the other saucers would have gone crashing to the floor with the unexpected rushing sensation of that touch. Marlene dips into a messy curtsey to hide her discombobulation and steps back behind the service counter, just over Mr. Lupin’s shoulder in her normal assistant’s place and entirely glad for the heavy oak span between her and the woman wreaking havoc on her finer functions. 

After several more minutes of discussion and decision-making through which Marlene pays as much attention as she can to the way Mr. Lupin expertly conducts his business without getting too lost in the curls of Lady Meadowes’ rare moments of speech, Mr. Lupin turns to Marlene with a subtle look that says  _ We’re going to make a killing off of these toffs. _

“If you please then, Ms. McKinnon, would you take Lady Meadowes’ measurements while I tend to Lord Black?” He asks, with a brisk tone that belies his own minor nerves as he shuts the catalogue. Marlene’s stomach twists and she opens her mouth once without sound before settling on nodding stupidly, taking up a notepad and pencil nub to mark numbers, and ducking back around the counter.  _ Bugger fuck, _ of course she would have to get close to the woman. The modesty of measuring and fitting ladies is one of the main reasons Marlene has been essential to Lupin & Son’s since riding habits have surged into higher fashion.

“If you’ll follow me, please,” Marlene says, gesturing over to the privacy stand she had used earlier as she forces as pleasant a smile as she can manage to her face. Lady Meadowes returns the smile with her own, reminiscent of that first lion’s grin she’d given at Marlene’s folly with the skirts earlier, one that says  _ You’re fooling nobody _ —Marlene feels her lungs tighten sweetly as she absorbs it.  _ Shit, shit, blessed burning shit.  _ She’s in thrall.

Marlene hardly hates it at all. 

Her heart is in her throat as Lady Meadowes trails her into the fitting space. The small hemming platform at its center is faced by a long, body-length set of mirrors, and for privacy’s sake the small area is blocked off on all sides with very tall wooden slats. Marlene rushes to push her muddied skirts from earlier into the corner where they won’t be too much of an eyesore; she’ll throw them in with the washing later today and get that taken care of and  _ Oh hell,  _ Lady Meadowes has already removed her hat and her waistcoat as is presently stepping up onto the fitting pedestal and moving to unbutton down to her corsetry. 

“You can leave your blouse on!” Marlene blurts and she knows she’s blushing again, damn it all; she inherited her mother’s complexion but also got the entirely English propensity to blush like an unbloodied maiden.

“That’s new,” Lady Meadowes says simply with a little shrug as she returns her arms to relax by her side. “Last time I was fitted for a gown, the seamstress stripped me nearly bare before she got started. Cold hands to boot, it was ghastly. Please tell me you have warm fingers?” She fixes Marlene with an expectant look in the mirror and Marlene sees the mischief deep down in those gold irises. She wants to die on the spot, ideally in one blink.

“Just—down to a blouse and stockings will be plenty, thank you, milady. I believe my hands are plenty warm, yes.” Marlene averts her eyes and digs in her pockets for her measuring tape, well-used and gifted to her by Mr. Lupin after her first week at the shop. Lady Meadowes is blessedly quiet as she removes her shoes and trousers—those alluring trousers that, without the waistcoat tails, make her bottom look perfectly rounded and plush and  _ STOP it, McKinnon _ —and she patently doesn’t re-fasten the top few buttons on her blouse. Marlene can’t decide of it’s more or less maddening to have the barest hint of the woman’s cleavage visible this way. 

“Arms first, if you please,” Marlene says briskly. Lady Meadowes extends her arms with the practiced motion of one who’s been fitted before by a great many tailors, and Marlene attempts not to drink subtly and deeply on her perfume again as she presses the measuring tape to the woman’s shoulder and stretches it down to her delicate, high-bred wrist.

“Tell me, Ms. McKinnon,” Lady Meadowes says with unerring casualty, “how does a pretty thing like you find herself on Savile Row?”

Marlene’s heart spasms behind her ribs and her mouth goes dry. She has to take an extra moment of self-collection as she jots down the neat measurement beside  _ Arm, R. _ “I don’t come from much, that’s probably obvious,” she replies with the most even-sounding calm she can muster, “but I’m a quick study and I’ve quick fingers.”

Lady Meadowes raises her elegantly-shaped eyebrows with a glimmer behind her expression, and Marlene’s stomach drops with a twist in equal parts mortification and thrill. “I mean—I run a very fine stitch. Milady.”

“I’m sure you do.” Lady Meadowes watches her with an observer’s smirk as Marlene continues measuring her arms and shoulders. Marlene has to stay herself from asking after the baroness’ perfume in earnest when she goes up on her toes and leans in to measure Lady Meadowes’ collar circumference, wrapping the measuring tape around that pale column of the other woman’s neck that shifts beautifully as she tips her chin up to give Marlene access to read the measurement number. Marlene feels herself slicken with the brief thought of attaching her lips to the curve of Lady Meadowes’ throat, tasting her there where her pulse beats pearl-blue and warm against Marlene’s knuckles, and she steps back before she can do any irreparable damage. She’s sure her face is at least flushed pink, but Lady Meadowes’ gracefully says nothing of it beyond her subtle little vulpine smile. 

Of course Marlene’s flush brightens with her next request; “You’ll be able to put your arms down in a moment, milady, just one more on your bustline.”

She rightly estimates the readout of the measuring tape before she finishes looping the tape about the perfectly gorgeous swell of Lady Meadowes’ bust—35 inches, followed by a 27-inch waist aided beautifully by her corsetry and a measure of 40 at the baroness’ hips to make Marlene’s imagination flare up with thoughts of this delectable body before her bare of anything besides her fair and unmarked skin. She’s never had to wrestle with errant thoughts like this with any other customer over the years.  _ Shit.  _ Marlene is only glad her arousal is the secretive sort, tucked deep into the pit of her belly where it smolders incessantly instead of showing outwardly. 

_ Well, _ Marlene thinks to herself as she bends to measure around each of Lady Meadowes’ ankles,  _ could be far worse. Could be attracted to men. _

Once Lady Meadowes’ measurements are complete, Marlene reluctantly asks her to dress herself again with an offer to aid her with refastening any buckles or ties. 

“No need,” Lady Meadowes says kindly, waving her hand in the air with flippant calm, “that’s half the upside of trousers. Everything’s at the front, no need for fussing.” She gives Marlene another enigmatic smile at that, reading her like a bloody book, and Marlene can only give a pale grin in return as more of her blood rushes southward. This is absolutely reckless, but Lady Meadowes seems to be enjoying it all thoroughly—Marlene can’t tell which side if the spectrum is more or less desirable. 

Or dangerous.

A lowborn seamstress lusting after a baroness is bound to cause heartbreak at best and humiliation at worst, and while Marlene doesn’t waste her time worrying what others think about her penchants she hardly desires the press of somebody’s estate breathing down her neck to make herself scarce if anything were to go tits-up—should she even  _ think _ of pursuing this, Christ alive, Marlene needs to get a handle on her own faculties. She rolls her measuring tape back into her pocket and certainly does  _ not _ watch closely as Lady Meadowes replaces her shoes with endearing reverence and sets her fashionable little hat back on her hair with a practiced tilt in the mirror.

“Thank you,” she says to Marlene, catching her eye in the mirror that throws her lovely reflection back and around on itself in a dizzying presentation of thrice-tripled countenance. “That was the single most pleasant fitting I’ve ever had.”

“Warm hands then?” Marlene quips before she can catch herself, initially horrified but quickly and secretly proud of it when Lady Meadowes throws back her head and laughs. Her smile is unguarded and wide, with healthy white teeth well-fitted to that pretty mouth of hers, and her hand rises to touch at her throat softly in a motion that looks entirely habitual and stokes the smolder in Marlene’s belly with a snarl.

“Indeed,” she sighs with mirth when her laughter fades. Her eyes flick over Marlene again, appraising, and it seems for the smallest clip of a moment that she might step closer to Marlene in the intimate cast of the fitting room and do something disastrously wonderful. But she only smiles again, smoothing that hand down her waistcoat. “How soon should I expect the final garment?”

“Your hunt is in three days, correct?” Marlene leads her back out from behind the privacy stand to see Mr. Lupin and Lord Black back the counter, Mr. Lupin having busied himself fastidiously with a new cravat coming to life on its pattern as Lord Black watches with attention a bit too rapt to be plain geniality.

“Correct—Friday morning, and quite early at that. Ideally we could have completed habits by Thursday, if that would be doable?”

“Lady Meadowes, you speak as though we aren’t the finest bespoke shop on Savile,” Mr. Lupin pipes up as he shakes out the attractive cutting of crimson silk and smiles over at the baroness when Marlene leads her to the counter. He accepts the measurement sheet from Marlene with a nod and glances it over while he ties the cravat around itself with one hand, ever the master of multitasking. “If you return on Thursday afternoon, just after tea, you’ll both be able to try them on for final fitting and take them home that evening.”

“Capital.” Lord Black beams at Lady Meadowes. “We’ll knock them dead as flies when the rest of the party sees what we’ve got, don’t you think?”

Lady Meadowes snorts with righteous derision, and Marlene can suddenly envision her looking very at home with a long cigarette in one hand and a polished cane in the other like one of those daring stage-going women of whom she’s seen photos from Brussels and Berlin. “Surely, we always have been the best at keeping seat.” She draws an expensive-looking calling card out from her pocket and places it gently on the countertop beside her before making honed eye contact once more with Marlene. “Thank you again, Ms. McKinnon. Do send a telegram if you might need anything from us in the interim.” 

“I—Absolutely, yes,” is all Marlene can think to answer. Lady Meadowes nods, looking pleased; Marlene has never wished more for the ability to listen into someone’s thoughts to diving a particularly complex expression than in this moment.

“Your cravat then, Lord Black. This should hold your craving for new apparel until Thursday,” Mr. Lupin says tidily. He hands the fresh kerchief over to the baron with a subtle flourish, and Marlene watches as the man takes several seconds to run his fingers over it and study its edges before immediately undoing the ascot currently around his neck to replace with the new one.

“It’s perfect,” he announces with the unique freedom of expression Marlene supposes one only learns when the world falls at one’s feet from the moment one learns how to stand; “I wouldn’t have chosen the color myself, wonderful eye.” He preens in the mirror mounted on the wall to his left, and Marlene doesn’t miss the swell of pride that pulls up slightly on Mr. Lupin’s shoulders to make him stand just a tick straighter.

“Stunning,” Lady Meadowes drawls simply. She pats Lord Black twice on the cheek, a perfunctory touch but a touch nonetheless, and Marlene finds herself thinking with a pang in her stomach for the first time that they share titles and look nothing alike—perhaps the two are married?

No; Lord Black is looking at Mr. Lupin as though he hangs the moon itself and doing purely awful job of covering it. Even if he and Lady Meadowes are man and wife, neither of them is particularly interested in keeping the sanctity of their marriage bed between the two of them or with anybody who resembles the other in sex.

“Shall we then, Sirius?” Lady Meadowes loops her arm around Lord Black’s and fixes him with an expectant look.

“I suppose, yes,” Lord Black says after a brief breath of hesitation that Marlene is most certainly not imagining. He replaces his hat and throws one last look over to Mr. Lupin, whose face does him the service of flushing just faintly enough to be noticable.  _ Cheers then,  _ Marlene thinks with an inward groan,  _ it’s the shop run by hopeless doting queers. Pretty folk get a discount. _ “Until Thursday. Be well, Mr, Lupin; Ms. McKinnon.”

“Good evening, milady. Milord.” Mr. Lupin nods his farewell to the handsome pair before burying himself in the lists of both patrons’ measurements with the bodily attention of one who patently refuses to acknowledge desire in their veins. 

The day that follows is long and fogged by daydreams as Marlene sets like a madwoman to cutting neat patterns into fine cloths. Silks and linens, the fabric bouquet of springtime, feel fresh and soothing on her fevered hands as she stitches and hems and constructs Lady Meadowes’ new garb on such a tight deadline—even through a hurried luncheon at the little table in the back of the shop through which she and Mr. Lupin exchange perhaps five words in total, Marlene feels her mind humming and growling like a coal engine. She hopes she’ll be able to sleep tonight despite such racket. 

After closing at just after 6 o’clock, waving at Mr. Lupin over her shoulder to go largely unnoticed with a distracted farewell hum from her proprietor as he bends near to a seam in royal blue linen for Lord Black, Marlene drinks deep on the cooled air that comes along with the sun dipped low behind the buildings. She walks back toward home, grateful to live near enough for the exercise of stretching her legs and freeing that fixation in her imagination, her sullied skirts from this morning stuffed into a rucksack slung across one shoulder, walking quickly all knees and heels like the men do but not caring for how a passerby might mark her gait at the moment. Marlene has been marginally afire for almost nine hours, and she has a singular need to either quench it or forget it. She can’t decide which she prefers more and decides she needs supper foremost. 

The pub below her flat crows its crowd into the street with its warm yellow light, revelers happy for the steady lengthening of daylight that lets them take their drink or smoke outside the crush of the interior for just a bit longer without threat of someone’s eager thieving knifepoint in the dark. Marlene knows several of the regulars by face but never by name, almost none of them women and so she hardly bothers. She slides her quid across the counter and gets her nightly supper of a pot pie after a moment, hot from the kitchen, before she shimmies her way back out through the press of fresh-off-work bodies and shuffles herself up to her modest little lodging with a sigh of arrival. 

Marlene tosses her muddied skirts into the empty hamper by her wash basin and sups to the pleasant background noise of someone’s premature drinking song filtering up from downstairs through her cracked window— _ “...she does as she likes and she says as she please; my wife, she's a devil, she's black as the coal! Give me the punch ladle, I'll fathom the bowl!” _ —The fresh washing she’s hung from the ropes strung along her ceiling flutter gaily in the threads of evening breeze like sails to make Marlene think of warmer days by the docks to the east of town, as well as the broader ship-bound women down there who have pleased her greatly once and again with nimble fingers and eager tongues when she’s had a bit too much to drink and flirts with the openness she sometimes envies in others’ daily confidence. Marlene thinks again of Lady Meadowes, unbidden, as she swipes a spot of grease away from her lips with a tiny kerchief at her dining table set for one. Her insides tremor sweetly, but she avoids attending to it directly and instead takes up the half-read novel on her bedstand.

Shoes shucked, waistcoat hung, stockings peeled off, outer skirts on loan folded and placed on her cupboard so as not to forget their return in the morning, Marlene flops onto her simple little poster bed like a marionette glad to be free of its strings for the evening. She unlaces her corsetry with deft hands in the same repeat rhythm of every night before and after, the tight little  _ one-two, one-two  _ of loosening each eyelet before she can pull the contraption up and off like some sort of great, lacy lobster shell. She drapes it in repose onto the little wicker chair to the right of her bed and shakes her hair down out of its ribbon, wild and free, before tucking herself into the dressing gown looped over her bedpost. She wiggles her bare toes in contentment, free of the trappings of society that make her feel pretty but just seem silly in the bare simplicity of privacy, and sets to reading. 

It’s a silly novel when Marlene thinks about it, it truly is—a penny romance specifically for women penned by a man with the boisterous alias E. J. Pepperhoff, a man who, in the saucier bits especially, get the heroine’s feelings just wrong enough and lavishes a bit too much poetry on her  _ objet d’amour’s  _ anatomy as he ravishes her in various places across her estate: the dining room, where it’s bound to be too drafty to strip as bare as the book describes; the stables, where straw would surely get into all sorts of awful orifices; the fields beyond the lady’s lands, where passers-by or perhaps a hungry wolf would find the couple and, with any luck, maim them silly. Marlene finds herself rooting against these hapless protagonists as she turns the pages, if only for the sport of it. 

The evening deepens a she reads and Marlene feels herself growing sleepy with the tug of exhaustion born from a solid day with very few breaks and a madness of concentration on very minute tasks. She wants to finish the book before retiring though—she’s hardly twenty pages from its ending and intent on getting a  _ much _ better exchange for it at the library as soon as possible. 

_“When next might I see you, Mr. Hargrave?”_ _I asked with a trembling voice, my delicate hands upon his chest. I felt his muscles ripple beneath the luxurious carpet of black hair there under his shirt and I knew then he despised the thought of departing as deeply as I._

_ “I know not, Emily,” he murmured. His strong arms clasped me around my lower back and held me close, and I gasped when I felt the hot press of his member thickening against my body. “But I do know what I would like to do by which to remember our time here.” _

Marlene rolls her eyes as she begins the final meeting of the countess and her groundskeeper, with all its colorful adjectives and synonyms for  _ swelling  _ out in full force. They begin snogging in the entrance hall before tumbling into the drawing room, somehow make their way up two flights of stairs without breaking their kiss, and finally end up disrobing in the countess’ quarters before her cold and forgotten marriage bed. 

“You could have just asked one of the maids for a toss without dealing with this brooding sod if you needed it so badly,” Marlene deadpans to the book in her hand before continuing:

_ Hargrave kissed me deeply, thrusting his tongue in to meet with mine as I responded hungrily from my place thrown back on the mattress. He massaged my sex with two strong fingers to make me mewl for him, beg him along. I wanted him all over my perfect ivory body.  _

_ “I want to kiss you, Emily,” Mr. Hargrave growled at my ear. He tucked a piece of my wild red hair away from my forehead and gazed into my glittering emerald eyes, drinking me in like an elixir.  _

_ “Robert,” I breathed, and my voice caught on his name—o, what’s in a name! “Robert, you have kissed me so thoroughly throughout this month that I shall never forget the taste of your lips.” _

_ Hargrave chuckled then, low in his throat with such a rumble that I felt my whole self quiver in response. “No, Emily,” he breathed against the swell of my right breast before he licked my peaked nipple like a rubied cherry and I moaned with surprised willingness. “I want to kiss you...down low.” _

“Oh, come the fuck on,” Marlene announces to the quiet of her room, slamming the little book shut and replacing it roughly on her bedstand.  _ I want to kiss you down low, _ who in their right mind would ever proposition a woman for a taste with a line like that? Notwithstanding what sort of woman would be able to stop laughing at the verbiage for long enough to give her answer?

Fucking men. Obviously none of them know what to do with quims besides marry the women who own them, at least not the ones writing smut books.

Marlene replaces her dressing gown on the chair and stands to clean her teeth before dousing her lamp and burrowing abed under her quilt. She’s grateful for the dawning middle-warmth that lets her sleep without an extra layer of blankets, and she listens for a time to the stew of the night beyond her window. The distant churn of drinkers, eaters, clattering carriages, barking dogs, spots of crickets here and there—Marlene has never known any lullaby besides London itself, and she’s comforted by it when she dives to find sleep alone most nights. 

But, Marlene finds with an irritated itch behind her ribs, sleep evades her tonight for longer than normal. She’s loathe to admit the subtle and persistent heat between her legs is to blame, but Marlene has had womanly urges for long enough to know when her body will refuse anything but climax before allowing her to fall asleep. It was a long morning filled with tension and a staggeringly beautiful woman, and now the abstract thoughts of oral sex—regardless of how well-rendered their source material was—have rooted themselves in Marlene’s brain and are not going to let go until she does something about it. She stares at the ceiling for a moment, mutely counting the beats of her pulse with a frown, before she grumbles abstract frustration at her own libido and slides a hand down her stomach. 

Marlene moves aside the hem of her shift, short for the season and not tangling around her knees like the longer ones tend to do in winter, and touches a gentle middle finger to her vulva. She feels herself flush at the touch, wetter than she had expected and reacting to the light pressure with a deep bloom of heat, and slips her finger shallowly into her opening as she bites down softly on her bottom lip. She slicks her finger with several indolent strokes—slow, shallow passes of the digit—before returning her touch to her clitoris, at which her hips tip up instinctually to press closer to the wet touch. 

She begins making slow circles around the little bud of nerves and adds her ring finger to the motion. Marlene falls into the practiced pattern of masturbation and closes her eyes to revel in the sparking feeling, petting her sex with the efficient and indulgent curl of her fingers twinned with the shapes and colors of her imagination. Her left hand finds its way to her breast after a short while and pulls aside her underclothes to free a sensitive nipple, which she pinches and rolls softly between two fingers as she begins to gasp quietly into her own building arousal. She slides the two fingers between her legs into her vagina again, deeper this time, down to her third knuckle and curling them rhythmically against the soft patch of her most sensitive skin within. She lets a half-voiced groan leap out of her when her fingertips draw a spike of acute pleasure up from her depths, threatening early arrival at the precipice she doesn’t yet want to crest, and so she removes her fingers to play again at her bud and see how long she can hold herself on this knife’s edge of fulfillment. 

Her mind races to and between different desires and thoughts, all made of soft curving bodies and the shapes of women she’s had or craved to have. After long enough they all twist together to become the blonde and fox-like fantasy of Lady Meadowes, tall and alluring and bare in this fantasy except for her stocking and garters, nestled between Marlene’s legs with her mouth doing sinful and beautiful things to Marlene’s limits. Imagining the way the baroness’ tongue might tease at her sex, tipping at her opening and sucking softly at her clitoris, makes Marlene’s blood surge with beautiful harmony and unwillingly speed the pace of her fingers. She cries out gently around a particularly saturated wave of sensation, rolling through her like a gust off the ocean, making her hands stutter sweetly against her skin as completion threatens her inner horizon with a languid kiss to her resolve.

After several more minutes Marlene abandons control and finally lets her body give over to incoming climax. Her imaginary phantom of Lady Meadowes focuses the flat of her tongue on Marlene’s bud as Marlene concentrates her fingers there, finding that perfect combination of up-and-down and side-to-side to keep her fingers wet and insistent. The flickering brightness at the base of her spine grows from a pinprick to a swordpoint to a cudgel, enveloping her from the inside out as Marlene pants and arches into her own touch. She feels herself attenuate like thread pulled too far through fabric, taut and twisting slightly as she frays, unravels, and then snaps in a glorious rush of release—Marlene lets out a wordless whisper of a cry and comes, hard and quivering, into her palm as she works herself through it and spasms softly around her own fingers. 

Once the tremors subside and Marlene catches her breath, sated and panting, she sucks her two fingers into her mouth to swipe her tongue across them to clean and taste the sweetish musk of her own body before brushing them along her shift to dry them. She hasn’t kept a cumrag on her bedstand since last summer, a riotous summer in which a ladies’ theatre troupe spent several weeks in the city and Marlene had two of the actresses at once in various positions at various times throughout the season—she hasn’t particularly had need for one in the time between. 

Fluttering thoughts of flexible women with beautifully boisterous laughter and hair that smelled of lilacs coil in and out of Marlene’s imaginings of Lady Meadowes in her starkest naked finery. Amid their soft flurry, Marlene slides into a heady sleep lain thick with the garlanded shapes of places of which she’s read at length on the other side of the world—Chios, the distant mountain, dearest Sappho’s lavender fields. 

—

The next day is a patchwork of ever more slicing, stitching, steaming, and snipping. Snuffles had been in absentia from his usual spot today as Marlene made the trek to the shop an hour earlier than normal, probably still asleep in whichever alley the mutt calls home, and so she makes it to the store with time enough to make adjustments to the pieces of Lady Meadowes’ habit she had roughed out yesterday before beginning new pieces. Her work is right on schedule as ever, regardless of how tight that schedule is for this project in particular. Marlene’s head is clear for once, thanks to her willingness to see to her own proclivities last night. She tries not to think so closely on it as she works lest she distract herself from the present with further fantasies. 

After a long ten-hour stretch of a day, after which Marlene fingers are raw and aching even with the use of thimbles guarding against pinpricks, Mr. Lupin manages to dredge up a true grin from Marlene’s depths when she sees him at his workbench with the half-finished brandy bottle and two empty glasses as she emerges from the back of the shop. 

“You need one as much as I do?” Marlene leans on the counter and nods at the bottle to accept the wordless offer, and Mr. Lupin sighs heavily as he uncorks it. 

“I’ve been adjusting trousers and coattails for the past two hours and I fear my eyes have crossed permanently for it. Hopefully a drink will  _ un _ cross them.”

Marlene laughs when Mr. Lupin finishes the two pours with a long tip of the bottle neck, and he dips a shallow bow with his unique sort of subtle comedy as Marlene claps her hands facetiously. “Cheers,” she says, “to trousers.”

“To trousers,” Mr. Lupin agrees through a surprised little jag of tired laughter. He clinks his glass with Marlene’s, the thick crystal of their stout bellies ringing loudly, and they down the doses in one go with identical winces for the burn of the stuff. 

“Man alive, I swear it’s fermenting the longer you leave it in that drawer,” Marlene coughs into the back of her hand. Mr. Lupin squints at the label of the bottle before remembering to remove his pince nez spectacles and rubbing his eyes in the meantime. 

“Were I a distiller instead of a tailor, I think my life might be a bit easier,” he sighs. He pours another drink for the both of them, one that they’ll sip in their unwritten tradition of commiseration, and Marlene smiles at the unraveled portrait be paints with the halo of dawning evening backlighting the man’s prim profile as he moves. 

“It would certainly smell different,” Marlene jokes. 

“Aye,” Mr. Lupin says with a twitch of his eyebrows in accented jest, “and the clientele would certainly be stiffer to bear.”

Marlene decides not to address the obvious innuendo and let conversation canter away on its own for a bit, ducking briefly into talk of new pubs opening up and what the scene has been like around the docks. They chat of Marlene’s neighborhood for a time, which delves then in Mayfair and, inevitably, brings the two to a stop at their most immediate pair of clients. 

“Do you think they’re married?” Marlene asks as she feels the telltale prickle of light inebriation pulling at her facial muscles as she speaks, ever the lightweight. Mr. Lupin lets out a particularly undignified snort. 

“If they’re married then I’m the bloody crown prince,” he says with a much more dramatic Dubliner pull to his words as his tight-laced disposition has slackened nicely. “They’re covering for one another.”

“What, bearding each other?”

“Dear God, you Sapphics can be crude. Yes.” Mr. Lupin polishes off his second glass and pours another with a kind smirk at Marlene through a sideways look to soften the friendly jab. 

“How are you so sure?” Marlene challenges him with one raised eyebrow, patient as he takes his sweet time swirling his drink around a few times like a sommelier with a loosened bow tie and a few curls coming loose from their slick about his ears. 

“Neither of them wears a ring,” he says coolly before taking a slow sip and ruminating on it for a moment, staring into the amber shallows. “In addition, Lord Black read me quite immediately and requested from me my presence at his club tonight while you and Lady Meadowes were taking her measurements yesterday.”

Marlene nearly chokes on her brandy and slams her glass on the worktable with a rather violent clatter. “Did you say yes?!” she blurts, half in disbelief and half in pure excitement. She had seen the way Mr. Lupin had quietly devoured the sight of Lord Black when she wasn’t busy mesmerizing herself with Lady Meadowes, and a bubbly sort of glee rises up in her when she watches Mr. Lupin’s mouth twitch slightly at its corners. 

“The answer to that questions is hardly befitting a lady.” Mr. Lupin bites back a smile around another hasty swallow, and Marlene bats at his arm with a laugh. 

“You utter Mary, what are you doing here drinking with your assistant then?”

“I still have twenty minutes to kill!”

“Oh please—” Marlene snatches the man’s glass before he can grab for it and holds it away from him with one eyebrow raised—“if you think you were hardly subtle about wanting him right here in the shop, you’re pulling your own wool over your eyes. Comb your hair, change your vest, go take a stroll outside, and meet him for your evening.”

Mr. Lupin flushes a handsome red and smoothes a self-conscious hand over the crown of his head. He’s still too polite to say anything to Marlene about her own obvious infatuation with Lady Meadowes, but Marlene smiles when she sees the promise of those thoughts sparkling behind Mr. Lupin’s irises. “You’ll close up then?” He asks briskly. Marlene pours the rest if his glass into hers and grins victory in two shining rows of teeth. 

“Set to it, have a lovely time.”

Mr. Lupin seems to hesitate briefly on the other end of the workbench before he clasps Marlene’s hand in his. He meets her eyes intensely, his cheeks still tinted pink, and Marlene knows at the pit of her heart she’d do anything on earth to help make this saint of a man as happy as possible. Found family is a bond she’s forged well with him over the years. “Thank you, Marlene,” Mr. Lupin says with full honesty, the heartfelt cadence of her name warm in his voice as he leans across the counter to press a boyish kiss to her cheek. “You’re better to me than I often deserve.”

Emotion trembles mightily at Marlene’s core, and to her surprise she has to fight a pang of happy tears for a moment. She dispels the threat with a soft swipe of her thumb along Mr. Lupin’s own cheek and shakes her head once in summative denial. “No such limit, Mr. Lupin. You’ve earned much and more of my kindness.”

He leaves her then with a bright smile underwritten with eagerness for what surely lies ahead—for Marlene is ignorant to the wiles of men but certainly not the universal proof of plain and immediate adoration between two people—and tucks himself in the back room to recompose himself while Marlene sets to finishing the dregs of both their drinks and begin tucking away various corners of the shop for closing. Mr. Lupin emerges five minutes later with freshly-swept hair and a newly-brushed vest with a spring in his step and a squared confidence to his shoulders that looks halfway feigned. It’s a terribly endearing sight.

“Have a fine time,” Marlene hums as she sweeps the invisible detritus of dust and the miniscule ends of threads into a pile she’ll shuffle out into the street when she leaves in a few minutes. Mr. Lupin can only stand to make a small sound of acknowledgement in return as he pulls on a fine frock coat, perfectly tailored as everything he wears, and is out the door like a shot before, presumably, he can find a reason to stand up his agreement to meet.

Marlene smiles to herself, distantly, like a sister left behind as her sibling runs off hapless into the sunset on a summer evening. Truly, it feels wonderful to see her proprietor so eager for something besides clothing for once. He deserves it.

Now, Marlene thinks with one last pass of the broom, if only she could figure out what to do with her own racketing heart.

—

The following day is insistently sunny when Marlene rises early again with the preoccupation of preparing for the final showing for their lovely pair of toffs. She sets up the shop all while squinting just so through the painfully accurate slice of daylight peeking in through the front windows that loiters for a solid ten minutes before it rises away beyond the buildings outside, straightening the displays and finalizing a few hems here and there on both Lady Meadowes’ riding skirts and Lord Black’s morning coat. Marlene realizes after about an hour atoil that Mr. Lupin is late, as she expected after such an invitation, but she certainly hopes he won’t show up as an attache to their clients. It would be hard to beg the highest price possible out of them if Mr. Lupin is still loopy with ardor so soon before final fittings.

Marlene decides to make herself an urn of coffee and at least leave some of the pot warm for Mr. Lupin whenever he happens to arrive, and she just finishes pressing the grinds and pouring a tall black cup of it when she hears the front door clatter open with a unique tone of harried nerves.  _ Speak of the devil, or as close as he can get to it. _

Marlene carries her tin mug out into the shop front where she sees Mr. Lupin busied with hurriedly unbuttoning a morning coat far too finely-embroidered to be one of his own along with a silk top hat the likes of which he’s never worn in the time Marlene has known him. The frock coat he’d taken with him upon his departure from the store is draped over his forearm.

“Good night then?” Marlene asks from the threshold of the back room. Mr. Lupin jumps and bungles the motion of undoing the last button before he furrows his eyebrows and quickly shrugs off the coat and pulls of the hat. He holds them with a subtle sort of favor that Marlene chooses not to mark.

“Not a bloody fucking  _ word, _ Ms. McKinnon,” Mr. Lupin hisses as he collects himself and straightens his vest. Marlene raises her eyebrows in surrender and nods back to the kitchenette behind her.

“Coffee’s on if you want for it.”

“Thank you. I’m—I’ve got to change, if our friends arrive they can very well wait for me this time.” Mr. Lupin barrels carefully past her into the back room where Marlene knows he keeps a rack of personal clothing beside a bare little bed, for the odd night in which he doesn’t go home after a long day. It works also, she supposes, for these extremely rare times Mr. Lupin allows his proclivities to rise to the surface despite his best efforts to hold himself away from satisfaction.

Marlene takes a spot of time to herself to finish the coffee, the storefront sufficiently immaculate, and retrieves the dress forms from their finished stays in the back room just before ten o’clock. The front door jangles open as she wrangles the rolling mannequins into handsome presentation beside the workbench counter, and Marlene turns with unguarded eagerness to see the lord and lady breeze in like the outright dreams they are. Lord Black wears an air of very proud grace, in sable today with a spot of dandy’s yellow threaded into his vest to lend just enough of a jaunt to his carriage, while Lady Marlene has arrived in skirts today in seasonal lavender purple that makes her eyes stand out like gemstones.

Those lovely eyes of hers go wide when sees the habit made for her, like a girl seeing a resplendent doll in a toy shop who immediately decides she must have it.

“Good morning, Ms. McKinnon!” Lord Black greets her with a voice that rings with refreshment, and when Marlene can find it in her to tear her eyes away from Lady Meadowes after a life-long second she sees him looking quite clear-eyed indeed. “I see you and Mr. Lupin have been busy, these are indeed staggeringly good pieces.”

“They’re utterly perfect,” Lady Meadowes blurts, as close as a high-bred lady can come to blurting anything. Marlene feels herself swell with pride, and she feels right in it; the habits they’ve prepared truly are things of beauty. Effortlessly modern, functional to a fault, slimming in all the right places but rightly accentuating assets where they must—shoulders, breast, hips; at least on Lady Meadowes’ hips. Marlene could hardly care less what needs accenting on Lord Black, but she’s confident Mr. Lupin has taken pains to make it perfectly natural.

“Thank you kindly,” Marlene says with a shallow bow. She tries very hard not to preen.

“I would love to try it on,” Lady Meadowes replies as she turns to Marlene, a sharp insistence there in her eyes that Marlene wants to sink into like fresh linens, but her reveries is interrupted when Mr. Lupin emerges briskly from the back. He’s dressed in fresh clothes and his hair is newly pomaded, and he colors deeply with an arrested stutter to his step when he sees Lord Black. The baron’s grin widens with something vaguely canine when he looks up sharply at the tailor’s arrival to greet him as well.

“Good morning, Mr. Lupin!” he announced boldly. He casually examines the fingernails of his right hand as though he makes to ask about the weather in London; “I trust you had an invigorating walk this morning, seeing as you were so noble as to refuse a hansom back from Mayfair.”

Marlene swallows laughter that still makes her sides quiver with mirth before she can tamp it down, but Mr. Lupin is quick to reply with airy wit. “One finds, milord, that the early daytime air is a preemptive cure for lingering thoughts that may cause a tailor’s fingers to fumble throughout one’s day.”

At that, Lord Black takes his own turn to adopt a couple shades of pink across his sharp sheeks and Lady Meadowes well and truly laughs with a leaping sound that makes Marlene think of bounding does in the heaths beyond the city. She takes Marlene by the elbow and wholly by surprise with a touch that makes Marlene’s skin light up deliciously. “We’ll have to excuse these two guinea hens before they end up on the floor before us,” she hums. Lady Meadowes eyes the privacy stand and gives Marlene an open, expectant smile that does terrible and beautiful things to Marlene’s guts. “Shall we?”

Marlene can only nod quickly as she takes Lady Meadowes’ dress form over to the privacy stand, enjoying very much the sight of the baroness walking before her— _ You’re already this far gone, Marley, go on and stare at her arse so long as you don’t trip over your own bloody feet _ . She sidles into the privacy stand and feels desire twist in her to see Lady Meadowes already setting undoing her blouse before the mirror. Trying her best to to openly stare at the magnificent shape of the woman’s breasts in her corset as Lady Meadowes moves on to undo her pretty purple skirts, Marlene assumes her role of handmaiden and assists with the folding and setting aside of the garments she disappeared so easily with her mind’s eye last night in the privacy of fantasy. Marlene bites down hard on the burgeoning wave of arousal when Lady Meadowes stands in just her underclothes and shoes, and she quickly hands the inner layer of newly-made habit skirts to the baroness in lieu of kneeling before her and kissing the flanks of her perfectly-formed thighs.

“Do you ever work with velvet, Ms. McKinnon?” Lady Meadowes asks as Marlene begins to help her fasten the clasps at the back of the skirts—she’s measured the waist perfectly, and the fastens lock just so. Marlene much prefers them to ties and does hope they catch on more quickly in the future.

“On occasion,” Marlene replies brightly, glad for a distraction that isn’t Lady Meadowes’ body or eyes or hair or  _ anything else in this fucking booth. _ “Especially in the winter, most ladies like their skirts a bit warmer. Velvet helps with insulation, and I think it looks rather cracking on a waistcoat.”

“Quite. It keeps one’s fingers warm too, don’t you think?”

Marlene immediately feels her stomach drop with a mix of doom and thrill when she realizes the innuendo Lady Meadowes has woven, hardly wanting to believe it. She had just dreamt of this yesterday, hadn’t she? Is she still dreaming? Marlene secretly pinches herself on the inside of her wrist and feels the sting of it as she ignored the blush building beneath her skin. She swallows and turns her attention to Lady Meadowes admiring the cut of the new habit in the mirror, turning here and there to see if from many angles, all of them beautiful. Marlene seizes bravery by the heart and nods as she decides to acknowledge Lady Meadowes’ meaning head-on; “I’ve found it to be lovely on the hands, yes.”

Those sapphire eyes flash with recognition in the mirror, pinning Marlene to the spot like a helpless button on a dress form as her lips curl into a very subtle yet possessive smile. Marlene notices with a frantic corner of her mind that Lady Meadowes hasn’t worn any lipstick today.

“Have you ever accompanied a lady to Bedfordshire then? In the winter, I mean,” Lady Meadowes asks, all calm as she turns back to admiring herself in in the mirror. It really is a stunning habit and Marlene should be very proud of herself right now, but she isn’t able to grasp enough of her thought process right now besides  _ Lord above and sky between, she’s coming onto me. I dreamt about her tipping my fucking velvet last night and here she is _ —

“Many times,” Marlene says, partially breathless as she can hardly believe her stupid, rash, maddening orphan’s luck. “A lovely place, that, there’s far around those parts that tastes like a dream.”

Lady Meadowes bites her lips together in reigned glee and wiggles her shoulders comfortably in the waistcoat that makes her look like Athena incarnate to take seat on a horse. Marlene can easily see it, her impeccable posture fifteen hands high off the ground, looking down at those around her like peons to be mastered. Marlene feels wetness building warm between her legs with the very thought of such control, and Lady Meadowes steps down off the hemming platform and turns to Marlene with a perfectly predatory look that rakes up and down Marlene’s body as she had the other morning upon seeing Marlene half-dressed.

“I wouldn’t have seen you as a biter,” the baroness murmurs, “not with that St. Margaret face of yours.”

Marlene’s pulse jumps to double-time and holds her ground, holds herself as proudly as she can against Lady Meadowes’ divine confidence. “And what do you mean by that, milady?”

“I mean, Ms. McKinnon, you’re far too pretty to be standing there completely clothed while we have the luxury of privacy.” Lady Meadowes takes her sweet time removing the calfskin riding cloves Marlene had stitched by hand just the other evening and wills her knees not to turn to water with the way the sight rushes straight to her quim. Lady Meadowes puts a hand to the single button on Marlene’s own waistcoat and holds it there as she looks up expectantly. “May I?”

“At your leisure, milady,” Marlene manages to whisper. Lady Meadowes slowly undoes the button and takes a step closer, mere inches apart from Marlene as Marlene is taken again by her delicious scent—new forest, fresh air, just a hint of sex to make her quietly wild where she stands. 

“My titles fits nicely on that tongue of yours,” Lady Meadowes hums as she slides the waistcoat from Marlene’s body and unbuttons the front of her blouse with efficient fingers. Marlene takes several swallows to find her voice again, and by the time she does she’s down to her corset with Lady Meadowes’ hand roving slowly along her ribs and the underside of her breasts.

“So would your own.”

Marlene hardly believes it’s her own imagination that drums that one up but she breathes it, barely audible and hitting home on Lady Meadowes’ ear to bring the baroness in over that final expanse of tight space between them for their first kiss—hungry press of lips at once foreign and familiar, breath caught as it always does in times such as this, expected and surprising in the same moment. Marlene’s eyes flutter shut and she reaches out immediately to draw the other woman nearer, caressing that fabric she had pieced together over the past day-and-a-half, looking like gilt perfection on Lady Meadowes’ body in a way Marlene could have hardly predicted.

_ And now she’s fit to fuck me in it. Patron saint of buggering, whomever you are, I’ll leave a bally feast at your altar next Sunday. _

Marlene responds eagerly to the hand that slides her underclothes aside as she had on herself the other night, sweeping across her breast with introductory tenderness that makes Marlene reach up with one hand to draw Lady Meadowes nearer against the fine golden hair at the nape of her neck. The baroness circles a thumb slowly against Marlene’s nipple to make her mouth fall open with a silent gasp, susurrating a soft and saucy  _ Shhh _ against Marlene’s bottom lip as she does so. Marlene bites down on that lip to hold in an encouraging sound then when Lady Meadowes pulls at the ties of Marlene’s own skirts, kissing her all the while and teasing at her breasts until Marlene can step out from the fabric and allow Lady Meadowes the task of sliding Marlene’s stockings down with maddening slowness.

Marlene wants to immolate herself and sing with satisfaction at the same time.

“If you can keep silent, kitten,” Lady Meadowes murmurs, pulling back just far enough for Marlene to look at her through half-lidded eyes and see that self-assured smirk on Lady Meadowes’ lips, “I’d love a taste of you.”

She accents the request with the first touch of her fingers against Marlene’s deeply-primed sex, and Marlene nearly comes right then with a violent buckle of her legs to sink into the feather-light pressure. “By—your leave, milady,” she manages to pant around the heady press of hottest arousal. Lady Meadowes chuckles to herself and kisses Marlene once more, reducing her ever closer to that hallowed arrival at oblivion, before she lowers herself into a dainty kneel and presses her lips to Marlene’s quim without preamble.

Marlene claps a hand over her mouth to stifle the blissful cry that snaps to life behind her tongue, rattling her back teeth with pure pleasure as she processes the wet, warm press of Lady Meadowes’ tongue. It’s everything she had dreamt up in the flurry of self-pleasure—present, hot, concentrated, expert,  _ Oh yes, _ she’s clearly done this before. Lady Meadowes teases at Marlene’s bud with her lips between auspicious strokes of her tongue and Marlene can hardly keep herself standing. She nearly stumbles to the floor when Lady Meadowes slides two fingers into her vagina and immediately finds Marlene’s heavenly spot along the quivering walls within.

_ “Ah—” _

“Softly,” Lady Meadowes insists to cut off Marlene’s announcement, paused between a particularly devilish new twist of her tongue. Marlene clenches her teeth and nods madly. She tries not to focus too pointedly on the feeling of the baroness’ attention on every part of her pulsing sex, the focused and manicured fingertip on her right nipple, the very real threat of two upstanding gentlemen none the wiser just beyond the privacy stand—or do they know? Are they aware Marlene is being undone before the mirror, debauched,  _ oh _ , somehow the knowledge of un-privacy makes it even better. Marlene looks up at the trifold of mirrors to look at the reflection there for the first time since beginning and sees herself undone, flushed pink at every high point of her bared body, displayed uncaring to the goddess before her who laps at her quim like honey, tending to Marlene’s pleasure like a rent girl and yet dressed in one of the finest habits Marlene has ever made,  _ wearing Marlene’s work _ —

Without the ability to warn the other woman of the impending completion, Marlene settles for gripping at Lady Meadowes’ wrist on the hand working her breast. Lady Meadowes makes a soft affirmative sound against Marlene’s wetness, so softly it almost gets lost in the swirl of Marlene’s galloping thoughts, but she hears it,  _ Fucking world afire, _ she hears it and it sets her body a-tumble. She crests climax like a shorn cliff, thrown from its heights in a great hurling throw that starts in her lungs and races down her limbs like boiling oil. Marlene comes, hard and long, with her teeth bitten down around the side of her hand to keep from crying out and Lady Meadowes’ attention never flagging through the entire arc.

It takes a few moments before Marlene can see or hear properly, her senses blown white like a bad photograph from the burst of satisfaction. When she returns to herself Lady Meadowes it still on her knees, as though she had simple knelt to be the one hemming Marlene’s shed skirts instead of the reverse of their roles. The baroness is wiping tidily at her bottom lip in a surprisingly alluring picture of a job well-done.

“Can—” Marlene’s throat catches around her own voice and, as she clears her throat softly, Lady Meadowes’ gaze at her warms with something so near to adoration that just might very well be it. “Can I tend to you as well then?”

“Oh, at a later time absolutely, yes,” Lady Meadowes says loftily. She replaces her riding gloves and lifts herself into a stand, helping Marlene hoist up her shucked skirts along the way. Marlene watches Lady Meadowes’ gracefully calculated movements in quiet awe as she readjusts the fall of her skewed corset before replacing her blouse— _ Petals shed and renewed, it truly is springtime. _ “When we’ve more room and freedom to be a bit more obvious with our pleasures, I’ll absolutely devour you, Ms. McKinnon.”

Marlene smiles with a deeply-wrought thrill as Lady Meadowes takes over fastening her skirts for her, catching her eye in the mirror while she presses a slow kiss to the junction of Marlene’s neck and shoulder. Marlene’s heart sings, a vaulted and ringing song, for finally amidst all these indulgent habits of hers Marlene feels as though that hollow feeling has been sealed. She isn’t naïve enough to call it  _ love,  _ but it’s certainly and violently amorous. 

“When shall I see you again?” Lady Meadowes murmurs against her skin. “Now that I’ve the new weeds I can hardly keep coming back to purchase more and more just to have you here in the fitting room. My estate would suffer, you understand.”

Marlene chuckles softly at the tart wit, holding Lady Meadowes’ eyes with bright humor in their reflection. “You can never have too many small adjustments made to the clothing you already own. Bring it in someday, bring it all. I did tell you I run a fine stitch, didn’t I?” She shivers slightly with a thrill when Lady Meadowes hums the affirmative and kisses her again, a bit higher up on her neck this time.

“Finer than I expected.” Marlene’s skin feels like it’s glowing from the inside out with the soft pressure of Lady Meadowes’ lips, blushed chestnut pounding a rich pulse beside the alabaster pale of the other woman’s face, and arousal spangles through her marrow in another slow, rolling wave beneath the sensation to make Marlene bite down on her lower lip to hold in a dopey smile.

“I’ll make you look like royalty,” Marlene whispers, halfway by accident to spill her inner thoughts into being. Lady Meadowes beams at it though, a brilliant and unabashed show of teeth as she wraps her arms around Marlene from behind and buries her nose in Marlene’s curls, and the world seems to settle around the moment like a summer breeze sighing to silence in a swell of linen with the sun shining through it in spun gold. 

 

_ —fin— _


End file.
